Google suspends the AI-supported search function "Ask Photos" for the time being

Google is pausing the rollout of the new AI search function called “Ask Photos” for your images and photos. This allows users to ask for information in the Photos app – in natural language. However, there are still various problems with this function. The rollout has therefore been suspended for around two weeks so that an improved version of Ask Photos can then be offered.

The data company had already announced “Ask Photos with Gemini” a year ago. This then-experimental function was one of the cool AI products at Google I/O that hardly anyone understood. Google explained in mid-May 2024 that Google's AI model, which had been specially trained for this image search function and was only used for this purpose, was used to understand search queries in natural language and find corresponding images with the searched motifs. In the following months, users should be able to try out Ask Photos.

New version of Ask Photos in 2 weeks

So far, however, this function has not been widely used and has only reached a limited number of testers. The reason for this has not yet been disclosed, but now Jamie Aspinall, Product Manager for Google Photos, has admitted to problems. “Ask Photos is not yet where it should be in terms of latency, quality and user experience,” writes Aspinall at X. “In about two weeks, we'll release an improved version that restores the speed and hit rate of the original search.”

When announcing the feature, Google had explained that “Gemini's multimodal capabilities help you understand exactly what's happening in each photo, and can even read text in the image if needed”. Ask Photos then creates “a helpful response and selects which photos and videos to return”.

Searching for text in images on Google Photos has been possible since 2019. And to create further confusion, Google announced an extension to its image search yesterday. From now on, exact words and phrases can be found in images and photos if they are placed in quotation marks during the search, writes Google. Google might know that this is not fundamentally new and therefore did not include it among the new features for the 10th birthday of Google Photos, which were introduced a few days ago.

Not the first problem with AI functions

Google stopping new AI functions after their initial introduction is also nothing new. For example, the company had to improve the AI overview in Google Search because the artificial intelligence (AI) referred to Barack Obama as the first Muslim US president and recommended that users use glue to keep the cheese on the pizza. Even now, Google's AI overviews are still not to be trusted.

Previously, Google already had to pause Gemini's image generation of people after AI inaccuracies after Gemini created AI images with people of Asian and African descent when asked about German soldiers from 1943. Google quickly acknowledged and fixed this. The AI's previous output was not intended to be this way. Google always wanted to offer a “range of people” so that the images would work all over the world. This also led to historically incorrect representations.

(fds)